


Adverse Conditions in a Certain Part of Central Russia

by meradorm



Category: A Young Doctor's Notebook
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-20
Updated: 2015-12-20
Packaged: 2018-05-07 21:14:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,481
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5470994
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meradorm/pseuds/meradorm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the midst of epidemic conditions in Muryovo and the surrounding villages, Dr. Bomgard tries to teach himself to grieve.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [3pipeproblem](https://archiveofourown.org/users/3pipeproblem/gifts).



Late in the evening, when the sun is white, Bomgard stomps a path in the frostcapped snow out to the shed Pelageya once used to store preservatives. There, in the corner, hidden by dust and a long-abandoned tangle web. Two bunches of dried oilseed, hung vertically. They have no scent except for the scent of leaves and age and an acrid green hardiness and in spite of everything, she tried. A jug of perfumer's alcohol in the dispensary, somewhere. (Obscure to him: how she hated herself for it, her inability to create anything beautiful out of herself, everything she did and everything she made heavy with hard labor and red-chapped hands. There's decency in that. She wanted more.)

He puts one of the bouquets on the desk in his study. Somehow it ends up underfoot. Wordlessly, he brushes it from the floor.

Late in the evening, when the sun is white, Bomgard follows the cart trail to the stables and presses his face to the snowflakes on a horse's winter coat, waiting. The horse fails to regard him. It eats. Rearranges its hooves on the sawdust floor. Bomgard gets the impression of impatience and a desire not to be cold. This was the feldscher's third favorite.

He sits in Natasha's room. He considers the harp.

_You hate the smell of fields and horses and can't stand the sound of strings,_ whispers a voice. A vague impression of _small_ and _dark_ and _youth_ and perifidious blue eyes, slinking around the periphery of his vision in a way he never quite managed in life. _You're cannibalizing them._

_I'm honoring them._

 

In the morning Bomgard hooks the horses up personally and spreads lime in the muddy path. More people at the gates, before the sun even bothered to rise. 

"People will find a way to suffer no matter what, won't they? They're so ungrateful," Anna says.

In the afternoon: gangrene. Carbolic acid. _Viride nitens_ in an alcohol solution. He sends a boy of sixteen who came in carrying his mother out to the tracks, half to get rid of him and half to hail down the supply train. No word from the regional administration center.

Thirty hours later: The rail bridge is out. It's been out for a very long time. No one is at the station in Grachyokva. 

Bomgard sees ashes, smells dust.


	2. Chapter 2

Wood has memory. This is hers:

You'll never feel safe unless in Paris. Still, you linger here. 

You wanted to burn. 

Your imperfections thrill you. You watch them, in your indulgence, in part because you know that no one else does. Every so often you laugh a little too loudly, talk to yourself, make a glib shrug or wide gesture when the correct response was a comment, something elegant and well-placed. All this detritus, left over from childhood.

You can't help it. Maybe you can. 

You must. 

Childhood. The Siberian sun shining dull yellow through the fog. Linden trees. Water disturbed by an unseen trout. From this dirt you were formed and shaped and held and now, somehow, when you reached the height of your beauty, the wild apex of your furious youth, it became _inappropriate._ They took you away from the estate, to Europe proper for your finishing.

How do you carry all these things in you? How do you keep fire locked in your breast? You long to run in the fields. You long to grieve in fits and starts. To drown yourself in the rushes.

You play the harp so that you remember: no, it's heaven from whence you came. Remember not the body but your immortal soul. Cold and still and light.

You will be a general's wife. 

_(and yet he is vast enough to keep all you are, he watches you in the dark places, he feels what you feel and sees you as you see yourself)_

Of course, the heavens are not politically appropriate, now. 

And everything inside of you revolts against the Bolsheviks, the scent of black pitch and smoke in the trees, the color of summer wheat, the toppling of palaces and the dismantling of polite regard. You have fought so hard to become what you are. What you sacrifice for, even unwillingly, you must love. 

You must. 

At night in Muryovo you crept out to the brackish stream and stood in the petrified weeds and let your dancing shoes fill up with mud. It's not deep enough to drown in and the torrent is still with cold, but you pretend. And you laugh. And you sob. No one will ever know this, you tell yourself, and slip out of your filthy clothes for the ugly pleasure of sleeping in a strange man's bed; as thoughtless and free as a girl curled up on her father's coat. 

 

Bomgard lets Perfidy talk, this time.

He stands in her room. He paces in the sunlight. He regards the motes. He tries to occupy the space she once used.

 _She was elegant,_ he begins, and runs out of lines. _She wanted to be regarded as a fragile thing._

_Oh, you know that's not true._

_A fragile thing, like a glass sculpture or a dancer. Something precious - yes - something small - she loved that sort of thing -_ And he runs his thumb down his middle phalanges. His child's hands.

"I've been looking _all_ over for you, doctor," says Anna. "You've got a message back from Grachyovka."

Thank the fates. He's been trying to get in contact with someone, anyone, for the better part of a week.

It's not a message, but one of the enlightened proletariat. Older than the sun, though by how much, Bomgard can't tell by looking. The faces out here run together, buried as they are under whiskers and furs. He has a telegram taken off the stationmaster's abandoned desk: _Adverse conditions in a certain part of Central Russia._

Engines too vast for him to contemplate. All his life distilled to this phrase.

"And what the devil does that mean?"

"Means they cut off the supply lines and passenger train. Won't let anything come in or go out within a hundred versts - or, sorry, within something something kilometers. On account of the conditions. You were the last thing they managed to send, doctor. You and a car full of potatoes. ...The administration _did_ send you, right?"

Bomgard is torn between the urge to look heroic - oh no, I came on my own, to lay my healing hands once more upon the land that so tenderly embraced, etc. - and the professional urge to comfort those living in fear and the Soviet urge not to get shot by making the powers that be look bad.

He splutters noncommitally until the old peasant walks away.


	3. Chapter 3

Bomgard lets his younger self handle this one.

_I don't want to die. I don't want to die! They said I was a hero. How could they?_

_\- We know very well you are not._

_Oh, I don't want your hysterical self-pity,_ he hisses, and that must be Bomgard himself more than the boy he used to be, so he loses it, for a moment. He becomes aware he is alone.

He retreats to the surgery. 

Anna's speaking Holy Unction over someone (under whose authority? Possibly, the icon of a bearded saint with wild eyes that appeared like a mystery in her bedroom after the portrait of Leopold Leopoldovich was shot. But Anna is alive, alive in her bitterness and spite, alive in a way that disgusts the doctor along with her inability to simply lay down and die and become a collection of impressions and facts. Something he can pull a grade-five idea out of. And so he simply disregards her, or perhaps sneers at the flashes she reveals of her inner life. Perhaps this was his deciding sin. God works in mysterious ways, she would have said.) The doctor pulls her away. 

The swellings have to be lanced. There are dozens of patients and more coming down the lime-soaked road. They need to bleed plague and pus, and they need to bleed it into something. The bedpans are used up and then the wash buckets and Bomgard won't let them near the china. And then Anna can't do the laundry quickly enough. (My God, the mangle is still broken.)

"Find anything. Old clothes, rags, anything. We've got to get the poison out."

Heavy canvas maps, so delicately kept they still make Bomgard think of fresh oil paint. A lion passes under his vision as Anna folds it once and over again.

He loved this place, didn't he? Had simple pleasures. Dazzling trousers, pickled sprats, a love of horses, and all of that accepted in a way that was simple and pure and unexamined ( _just the way he regarded you,_ Bomgard thinks to himself). Why collect the cartography of faraway places? Why map the places he knew? From what well did he draw that passion, that heroism?

_You expect everyone to be a coward like you._

Anna lifts the girl's arm, shows him a buboe the size of a rubber ball.

"Should I place it under the - "

It occurs to Bomgard (he congratulates himself on its poetry) that he'll never see that yellow lion again.

"No. Not this one," he mutters. "She's gone septic. See the rash? She won't make it an hour. Then we'll have more room on the floors, if we're lucky." The girl's eyes are closed. Bomgard hopes she cannot hear.


	4. Chapter 4

The first thing God did, according to Anna, was create laws to contain his vastness. (Physical laws, Bomgard would have told her: the speed of light, the transfer of heat.) And God himself struggled. God lived in terror of himself. He made a covenant with his people: he will never again flood the earth.

He made mankind to disobey. This is his wildness, this is his freedom. 

He set down laws for man for they were created in his image and what benefits God could do no worse for them. He lays down a praxis: this is Job. This is my will. I see you and know you. I want the best for you. I swear.

It occurs to Anna, just now, that he must love the bacilli just as much as them and give them their blessings and their freedoms too.

How could he make a world so hellbent on devouring? God is always trying to swallow Himself.

All this inside of him. Agony and rigidity and love. A law as vast as the laws of physics. 

And miracles are the place where God breaks.

Anna hates her dark thoughts. They're no good for her. She's no intellectual. Not like him.

She tries to see God in Leopold Leopoldovich, she tries to see God in newborn children. She tries to see God in the crude little crosses she makes. All life returns, like the stream, to the source - or however that one is supposed to go.

Anna can't bring herself to leave the surgery (even now) so she retreats to a corner and prays, tries to wake that up within her, the compassion of the saints. A love to turn God's face away. A love that strains against the bonds.

It doesn't come to her. She cannot feel it.

They're hauling in another plague victim from Grabitovka. Dead on arrival. Thank God.

 

Bomgard lays down his own laws. 

You need your mind clear.

 _Remember how clear it was. All the power and none of the grief. All that masculine strength._

Then: _They can't possibly expect you to abstain under these conditions._

(He never stops to think who he meant by "them.")

A cascade of laws. Half to the patients and half to him. A quick downward progression to yes I know they are in agony but I'm the doctor, the only doctor, and all they have to do is lay there and die.

But for a night he's quick-minded and clear-headed. What was that vaccine, ten, fifteen years ago? (Longer.) What was it published in? Was that journal declared bourgeois? Is there a copy here?

Khavkin grew a culture in butter fat and broth. Boiled the parasite _(I mean the bacillus)_ at 70 degrees - 

_They're letting you die in here. Who needs a single doctor? A doctor of venereal disease?_

Bomgard's hauling the cadaver outside. "Oh, will you _hush_."

He checks in on the study. The culture isn't growing. It's too cold, Bomgard realizes. (Honestly, how couldn't he have thought of that? A thousand excuses spiral out of the other him: _well, I'm not a researcher, we had very little laboratory training, they never meant me to be -_ )

The bacilli need body temperature conditions. Keep it by the fire. In forty-five minutes the glassware's exploding. Mistakes. Always mistakes.

Try again. You have to.

There's sweat on the back of his neck.

_We don't have a fever, do we?_

_I don't know._

He remembers they wanted to build industry in these parts. Tear up all the oilseed.

_They're clearing us all out._

Bomgard retreats to his study with a vial and a needle. "Anna, I'm done for the night."

He's done.

He gets out a book of history. It's a pleasantly dry, unwieldy thing. Scent of old paper. The most sedate library. It's a comfort to him. Everything all in the abstract once more. 

Still, it suggests something. He has a vague recollection of a radical theory, that the Plague had to happen and happened according to universal Law. It cleaned out the nobility, left the countrysides silent with wind and grass. The serfs grew in value, there was no one to till the land. The two classes of people came to need one another. There is justice here. There is freedom and peace. _No yest' pokoy i volya._

 _Try again. Please, just try again. Put the needle down. I don't want to die a coward,_ the young doctor begs. _We can survive. I can carry them in me -_

Then, viciousness: you don't want to die a coward only because it strikes you as a beautiful idea.

_I have a debt._

And you only want to think you have a debt for the same reason. 

_Yes. I know. Forgive me. Please. Forgive me._

Find a reason, find a fantasy, find a law. A place where it all looks reasonable. Or forgive yourself just because you can.

"The plague needs cowards," Bomgard speaks. Eyes closed. Mouth the only thing that's moving. "The revolution does too. It needs people to lay down and die and die and die. Don't be a hero."

_Forgive me._

That incessant demand.

But he gets up, then. Whether it was for the vial on the desk or for the glassware in the dispensary, he hadn't quite made up his mind before something closes in his throat, and he coughs a spot of blood onto the wooden floor, worn shiny with the footsteps of the dead.


End file.
